Volume 1, Issue 4, 2015

William Bartram’s Inimitable

Picture: Representation as the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge

Elizabeth Athens, Worcester Art Museum

In July 1767 the London mercer

and natural history enthusiast

Peter Collinson (1694–1768)

requested a drawing of the

American lotus (Nelumbo lutea)

from William Bartram (1739–

1823), a Pennsylvania botanist.

Collinson alternately referred to

this exotic as Colocasia and Faba

aegyptica, which he had

attempted, unsuccessfully, to

establish in his garden at Mill Hill.

Disappointed, he asked for a

“picturesque figure” that featured

the plant’s leaf, flower, and seed,

so that he might better ascertain

its genus and species.1 In

response, Bartram produced a pen-

and-ink drawing that depicts the

lotus as it grows in its marshy

environs, capturing its

development in the portrayed bud

and blooms.

(Fig. 1). William Bartram, Round

Leafed Nymphea as Flowering.

Colocasia [Nelumbo lutea, American

lotus and Dionaea muscipula, Venus

fly-trap], ca. 1767, black ink, 39.8 x

30 cm, The Natural History Museum,

London. Photo: Trustees of The

Natural History Museum, London. 2

To enhance the picturesque effect,

he tucked beside it a vignette of a

great blue heron and a Venus

flytrap, each pursuing in its own

way its respective quarry. The bird

dips forward to catch a tiny fish,

while the flytrap’s lobes open to

entice a mayfly.

Bartram faithfully adhered to

Collinson’s request, yet surely the

composition was unlike anything

Collinson could have expected. The

lotus blossoms tower overhead,

dwarfing the great blue heron in

the foreground, while a flat,

floating lotus leaf tips forward, as

though seen from above. The

drawing’s inconsistent scale and

multiple points of view are

disruptive, and some scholars have

interpreted them as the work of a

draughtsman unfamiliar with the

conventions of natural history

representation or, at the very

least, the work of an untrained eye

and hand.3 While Bartram’s colonial

status might encourage such

interpretations, this drawing

suggests something quite different:

not his unfamiliarity with, but

rather his ambivalence toward,

natural history conventions.

Bartram’s drawing of the American

lotus models his concerns about

natural history representation and

its claim to accuracy.

Standards for picturing nature in

the Anglo-American world were

codified in the publications of

London’s Royal Society and were

premised on the idea that what

one can know turns on what one

can see.4 Seventeenth- and

eighteenth-century artist-

naturalists employed certain

devices to underscore a sense of

transparent transcription in their

representations of nature. Some

excised the specimen from its

original setting and emphasized its

taxonomic characteristics, whereas

others situated it in an agreeable,

if wholly invented, environment.

Regardless of the device, the

artist’s mediating role was to

appear carefully controlled, almost

effaced, so that knowledge might

be presented as self-evident truth,

rather than a process of empirical

observation and rational synthesis.

This visual rhetoric of transparency

and self-evidence essentially

minimized the efforts of colonials

who observed and collected

American natural productions for

study. Letters, specimens, and

drawings from British North

America were shipped to London,

where they were examined by

European virtuosi, incorporated

into a preexisting body of

knowledge, and visually re-

presented as fact. By the mid-

eighteenth century, however,

naturalists had begun to recognize

that propagating species in foreign

sites, under new conditions, could

effectively alter the plants’ lived

expressions.5 This recognition

challenged existing

representational conventions, since

the material interdependence of

plant and environment could

neither be properly assessed

through transplants and preserved

specimens, nor transferred,

unaltered, to a two-dimensional

representation on paper. In his

drawing of the American lotus,

Bartram registered the problems

inherent in such notions of

transparency and self-evidence; he

did not present knowledge as a

seamless whole, but rather

encouraged viewers to trace his

material and intellectual

construction of it.6

A Curious Performance

In eighteenth-century natural

history, “plain” was a laudatory

term. It suggested that natural

productions and their

representations were minimally

mediated, as close as possible to

the objects’ original state. For

flora, specimens that had been

placed “betwixt the leaves of some

large Book . . . till they are

sufficiently dryed” were especially

valued, and Bartram’s drawing of

the lotus adapts, in part, the

specimen’s flat, matter-of-fact

presentation.7 In the lower right

corner of the composition the leaf

floats on the surface of the water,

surrounded by three blossoms and

two towering leaves. While the

flowers’ staggered and overlapping

forms imply a fictive three-

dimensional space, the floating

lotus leaf does not participate in

this fiction. It tips forward, as

though pressed against the surface

of the paper, mimicking a dried

and pressed leaf, such as those

collected by the naturalist Mark

Catesby during his American

travels in 1722.

(Fig. 2) Mark Catesby, Nelumbo lutea

specimen, 1722, Sherard Herbarium,

Oxford University (Photo: Oxford

University Herbaria, Department of

Plant Sciences)

Catesby sent these lotus specimens

to the Oxford botanist William

Sherard with minimal commentary,

providing only the plant’s

references in Leonard Plukenet’s

botanical publications, as well as

his name and the place and date of

collection, indicating that the

prepared specimen could speak for

itself.8 In tipping the lotus leaf

forward, Bartram visually echoed

this seemingly unmediated method

of conveying nature.

The specimen was well suited, in

the European mind, to the

American collector, since it offered

neither inference nor

interpretation, but rather the

material object itself. In so doing,

it minimized the potential

interference in transmitting

botanical particulars to Europe,

where they could be assessed,

compared, and incorporated into

natural knowledge. At the same

time, however, other

representational models were

encouraged of the American

colonial, especially since the finer

details of the plant could be lost in

drying and pressing. In the

eighteenth century, selected details

held great meaning: according to

the predominant taxonomic system

of the day, developed by the

Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus,

plants could be identified and

classified by the number, shape,

position, and proportion of their

stamens and pistils, as well as by

the morphology of their petals,

calyces, fruit, and seeds.9

A visual manifestation of this

classificatory system can be seen

in the illustration of horsebalm,

made for Linnaeus’s Hortus

Cliffortianus (1737) and designed

by the noted botanical illustrator,

Georg Ehret.

(Fig. 3) Jan Wandelaar after Georg

Dionysius Ehret, Tab. V: Collinsonia,

from Carl Linnaeus, Hortus

Cliffortianus (Amsterdam, 1737),

engraving. Photo: Wellcome Library,

London.

The plant is situated in the

Linnaean class Diandria, order

Monogynia, meaning its flower

possesses two stamens and a

single pistil. The plant would be

distinguished from other genera in

its class and order by its five-

toothed calyx, its small tubular

corolla with distinctive fringe, and

its single round seed, all of which

are carefully and distinctly

rendered. Despite the seemingly

“natural” appearance of Ehret’s

horsebalm illustration, the close

attention paid to these taxonomic

characteristics reveal the image is

far less portrait than it is

diagram.10

Bartram’s drawing of the American

lotus likewise gives the flower its

full due, in accord with Linnaean

botanical taxonomy, and presents

a bud, an open blossom, and a

fully blown bloom. The bud offers a

clear view of the calyx, while the

open blossom highlights the

corolla’s double row of petals. The

fully blown bloom, depicted at the

instant before the petals fall away,

reveals the flower’s many stamens

(as corresponds to its class,

Polyandria) and the lotus’s

distinctive fruit, pocked with seeds.

Bartram’s portrayal of the lotus’s

flowers reveals not only his

material familiarity with the plant,

but also his conceptual familiarity.

To the specimen-like leaf and

Linnaean flowers, however,

Bartram appended another visual

convention—the vignette—that

worked to undermine the drawing’s

sense of representational

transparency. Bartram situated the

leaves and flowers in a pond, with

a heron perched at its edge. The

bird suggests a moment of

narrative suspension, as it tracks

the movement of a fish through

the water. This scene calls to mind

the work of Bartram’s model and

mentor, the British ornithologist

George Edwards, who popularized

the vignette as a means for making

natural history representations

seem self-evidently “natural.” In

the preface to his Natural History

of Uncommon Birds, Edwards

wrote that he often elaborated the

“Grounds” of his plates with

additional flora and fauna. The

intent was to avoid the unpleasant

sameness of other ornithological

illustrations, but such elaborations

were also intended to make his

etchings more “natural and

agreeable,” thereby transforming

his illustrations into scenes the

viewer might plausibly encounter.

(Fig. 4) George Edwards, Plate 135:

The Ash-colour’d Heron from North-

America, from A Natural History of

Uncommon Birds, vol. 3 (London,

1750), etching. Photo: Trustees of The

Natural History Museum, London. 11

In his own drawing, Bartram

borrowed from his mentor quite

literally—the great blue heron,

pond, and fish are all deftly copied

from Edwards’s illustration—yet his

citation does not create a more

natural and agreeable environment

for the lotus. Rather, it highlights

the drawing’s sense of disjunction;

where the flat leaf disrupts a

tentative construction of depth, the

bird undermines it entirely.

Bartram could have chosen any

number of species from Edwards’s

publications to augment his

portrayal of the lotus, yet he

selected a strikingly large bird, all

while shrinking it to a small

addendum at the edge of his

composition. It looks in danger of

being enveloped by the leaf behind

it, even though the leaf’s natural

diameter of 12 to 16 inches is only

a third of the heron’s projected

height. Due to the drawing’s

disorienting inconsistencies of scale

and alternations between surface

and depth, the portrayed objects

do not read as part of a legible

perspectival scheme, nor do they

appear to occupy the same plane.

The composition instead constructs

a spatially indeterminate world that

shifts between flatness and

fullness.

The Picturesque and the

Pleasures of Pursuit

Though strange, the spatial

indeterminacy of Bartram’s

drawing seems the product of

intention, in which the naturalist

interpreted Collinson’s request for

a picturesque figure in the broader

sense of a visually appealing

design. In the 1760s, the

picturesque most commonly

referred to a Claudean landscape

composed of interlocking wedges

of color and tone that yielded a

pleasing gestalt and a gentle

movement in and through the

composition.

(Fig. 5). William Woollett after Claude

Lorrain, The Temple of Apollo, 1760,

etching, 43.5 x 57.2 cm, The British

Museum, London. Photo: The British

Museum.

In his 1753 aesthetic treatise, The

Analysis of Beauty, the English

artist William Hogarth maintained

that an image representing no

particular scene but composed of

“lights and shades only, properly

disposed . . . might still have the

pleasing effect of a picture,” and he

provided two non-representational

scenes of his own design to

illustrate the point.

(Fig. 6) William Hogarth, The Analysis

of Beauty, Plate II, 1753, engraving,

42.5 x 53.5 cm, The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York. Photo: The

Metropolitan Museum of Art. Detail. 12

Hogarth would yoke these

compositional ideals to the

convincing portrayal of volume and

three-dimensional space, but he

ultimately defined the picturesque

as the visually pleasing

arrangement of lights and darks

across a surface.

“When lights and shades in a

composition are scattered about in

little spots, the eye is constantly

disturbed,” Hogarth observed, and

he instead directed artists to carve

the composition into three or five

parts to establish a visually

compelling variety.13 Bartram

appears to have followed these

directives in his drawing for

Collinson. In the striated bottom

band, encompassing the lower

third of the composition, Bartram

provided a dark, contrasting

background for the lotus leaf and

the delicately balanced great blue

heron. In its top register he

inverted this light-against-dark

arrangement by leaving the

background untouched, and

figuring against it the three flowers

and two tented leaves. Bartram

stitched these parcels together

with the stippled lotus stems and

the flowering plant on the

drawing’s far left edge, creating an

interlocking composition. Formal

rhymes enhance the effect: the

repeated use of an ovoid or

teardrop shape links the body of

the bird, the lotus bud, and the

thinly inscribed vein patterns on

the lotus leaves.14 The drawing’s

division by thirds and fifths, along

with the unity of its composition,

faithfully adheres to Hogarth’s

instructions.

In his exceptionally literal

interpretation of the picturesque,

Bartram substituted elegant

surface design for spatial

coherence. The alternations

between flatness and fullness

emerge from his refusal to

integrate the drawing’s different

representational conventions into a

plausible portrayal of three-

dimensional space. Instead, the

drawing lays bare its seams,

offering a visually pleasing but

bewildering vista. Just as Bartram

explored the American wilderness

to pursue unfamiliar species for his

European colleagues, so, too, must

the drawing’s viewer explore and

assess this unconventional

landscape. Bartram even reinforced

the theme of pursuit in his

alteration of the heron, which

hunts its prey with greater alacrity

than in Edwards’s etching, and in

his inclusion of a Venus flytrap,

which patiently attends the

mayfly.15

While Hogarth’s aesthetic dictates

provided Bartram with a template

for the picturesque, they also

offered a model for conveying a

sense of exploratory movement.

His Analysis was an enormously

popular text in British North

America, where the absence of art

academies required aspiring artists

to train abroad or to teach

themselves through manuals. The

English artist’s prolific print

production made his artwork well

known in the colonies, and The

Analysis and a full portfolio of

Hogarth’s prints were acquired by

the Library Company of

Philadelphia before 1767.16 Perhaps

it was at the Library Company that

Bartram first encountered the

volume, or in the collection of a

friend. Though there is no written

record confirming his familiarity

with Hogarth’s text or engravings,

his drawing of the American lotus

suggests that he derived from The

Analysis a model for the portrayal

of pursuit.

Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty

presents “fitness” as the

overarching requirement for

beauty, since a beautiful form is

one suited to its object and

function. Fitness establishes a

proper balance of variety and

uniformity, simplicity and intricacy,

and yet—because this balance is

not a given—Hogarth’s theory also

necessitates a process of

discovery. His text often reads as a

paean to pursuit: “Pursuing is the

business of our lives,” Hogarth

observed, “and even abstracted

from any other view, gives

pleasure. Every arising difficulty...

gives a sort of spring to the mind,

enhances the pleasure, and makes

what would else be toil and labour,

become sport and recreation.”17

According to The Analysis,

aesthetic pleasure is inseparable

from its discovery: “Wherein would

consist the joys of hunting,

shooting, fishing, and many other

favourite diversions, without the

frequent turns and difficulties, and

disappointments, that are daily

met with in the pursuit?” Forms

that keep the eye in irregular

motion are enjoyable, even

beautiful, just as a cunning old

hare pleases the hunting dog more

readily than a prey easily caught.18

Hogarth illustrated the pleasures of

pursuit not only through verbal

metaphors but also through the

visual associations found in the

treatise’s explanatory plates. Each

features a central scene with a

series of numbered figures ranged

round its border.

(Fig.7) William Hogarth, Analysis of

Beauty, Plate I, 1753, etching and

engraving, 39 x 50.5 cm, The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum

of Art.

Despite the taxonomic effect of the

numbered figures and gridded

border, the represented objects

seem almost arbitrary. The

perimeter of Analysis of Beauty,

Plate 1 features, among other

things, cross-sections of molding

and natural and stylized plants. Its

central scene of a sculpture yard,

though carefully organized

according to linear perspective,

hosts a similarly strange

assortment of figures. While it

portrays casts of classical statuary,

as befits the locale, it also depicts

such unanticipated inclusions as a

turbaned man reading an anatomy

text. The relationships among the

scene’s objects are associative,

and Hogarth encouraged viewers to

pursue these patterns.

Hogarth’s description of “pleasing

forms,” for instance, offers just one

example of this pursuit. His text

notes how the curves of the

molding in figures 35 and 36 of

plate 1 are divided into “well-

shaped quantities” that yield a

pleasing effect, not unlike the

parsley-leaf in figure 37, which is

similarly divided into “three distinct

passages.”19

(Fig.7a) William Hogarth, Analysis of

Beauty, Plate I, 1753, etching and

engraving, 39 x 50.5 cm, The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum

of Art. Detail.

While the text identifies the

figures, it is the viewer’s task to

find and compare them. Figure 37

is to the immediate left of figures

35 and 36 in the upper right

quadrant of the picture, making

them relatively easy to locate, but

other references require a

concerted search.

(Fig. 7b) William Hogarth, Analysis of

Beauty, Plate I, 1753, etching and

engraving, 39 x 50.5 cm, The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum

of Art. Detail.

For instance, when the text cites

figure 48, a capital composed of

hats and periwigs that exhibits the

same balance of simplicity and

variety as the molding and parsley-

leaf, it would seem that it, too,

should be located in the upper

right quadrant of the plate.20 Yet

the area shows only figures 35 to

37, 40 to 47, and 50, forcing the

eye to scan the frame and enter

the perspectival space before

locating the capital next to the

turbaned man.

In encouraging this sort of

“dynamic perception,” to borrow a

term from Hogarth scholar Frédéric

Ogée, the plate calls into question

the naturalness of both the

specimen drawing and illusionistic

perspective.21 The plate’s gridded

frame reads as a series of Ehret-

like engravings, each featuring an

isolated object or set of objects, as

though presenting the self-evident

knowledge of a natural or cultural

production. Yet Hogarth juxtaposed

these individual images against the

one-point perspective of the

central scene, thereby creating a

jarring union of different

representational modes. In

tracking his formal comparisons,

the eye shifts between surface and

depth as it moves between

taxonomic and perspectival grids.

In prompting these shifts, Hogarth

disrupted the concept of

representational transparency and

self-evidence, and instead

demanded the viewer’s active

engagement.

Bartram’s rendering of the

American lotus equally triggers

such participation. Its bewildering

sense of space keeps the eye

motile, scanning the composition in

an attempt to makes sense of its

shifting scale and points of view.

Through this act of pursuit, the

viewer encounters the objects and

concepts by which Bartram came

to know the natural world, signaled

by the specimen-like leaf, the

Linnaean flowers, and George

Edwards’s heron. Moving from his

material observations to their

rational processing, the drawing

indicates that natural knowledge is

neither self-evident nor the product

of a distant and disinterested

curiosity, but is the result of one’s

own physical and intellectual

investment in the living world.

More field guide than transparent

window, Bartram’s pen-and-ink

drawing maps out that investment,

taking the viewer through the

different stations of empirical

observation, discovery, and

synthesis. On receipt of the

drawing that Bartram had so

laboriously crafted, Peter Collinson

described the awe and wonder it

produced. “I and my Son opened

my Ingenious Frd Williams,

Inimitable Picture of the Colocatia,”

Collinson wrote in February 1768.

“So great was the Deception it

being a Candle Light that we

Disputed for Some Time weather it

was an Engraveing or a Drawing it

is really a Noble peice of Pencil

Work . . . I will not Say more in

commendation because I shall Say

to Little where So Much Due.” 22

One can imagine Collinson and his

son hunched in the dim winter

light, perhaps tracing the drawing’s

lines with their fingertips, and

imagining the intensive effort

required—Bartram’s effort—to craft

such an “Inimitable Picture” of

natural knowledge.

14

ENDNOTES 1 Collinson to John Bartram, July 31, 1767, in The Correspondence of John Bartram: 1734–77,

ed. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida,

1992), 685; hereafter CJB. William’s father, John, was a nurseryman who encouraged his son’s

natural history pursuits.

2 Collinson to W. Bartram, Feb. 16, 1768, in William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design,

ed. Thomas Hallock and Nancy Hoffmann (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2010), 72.

3 Charlotte Porter views the strangeness of Bartram’s work as a result of his colonial status; see

her essay “The Drawings of William Bartram (1739–1823), American Naturalist,” Archives of

Natural History 16:3 (1989): 289–303. Christopher Iannini, on the other hand, overlooks the

drawing’s fragmented quality and suggests instead that it conveys a “sense of epistemological

stability and transparency.” See Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian

Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

2012), 179.

4 For a discussion of knowledge as visible and possessible, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of

Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),

72–91.

5 Daniel Worster describes the development of a proto-ecological view of nature in Nature’s

Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994). For a discussion of the eighteenth century, see especially chapters 1 and 2. As pertains

specifically to the Anglo-American exchange of plants, see Stephanie Volmer, “Planting a New

World: Letters and Languages of Transatlantic Botanical Exchange, 1733–1777,” (Ph.D. diss.,

Rutgers University, 2008), 22–63, 221–54, and Amy Meyers, “Picturing a World in Flux: Mark

Catesby’s Response to Environmental Interchange and Colonial Expansion,” in Empire’s

Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, ed. Amy Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 228–61.

6 Michael Gaudio suggests that Bartram was driven by a desire for representational transparency;

see “Swallowing the Evidence: William Bartram and the Limits of Enlightenment,” Winterthur

Portfolio 36:1 (Spring 2001): 1–17. While I agree Bartram was fascinated by transparency, he

seems always to have recognized it as duplicitous.

7 John Woodward, Brief Instructions for Making Observations in all Parts of the World (London,

1696), 12.

8 Woodward, Brief Instructions, 12.

9 For a brief description of taxonomically relevant properties in the Linnaean system, see Kärin

Nickelsen, “The Content of Botanical Illustrations,” in Draughtsmen, Botanists, and Nature: The

Construction of Eighteenth-Century Botanical Illustrations (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 71–105,

esp. 96–97.

15

10

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison refer to this as a “reasoned image”; see Objectivity (New

York: Zone Books, 2007), 58.

11

George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, vol. 1 (London, 1743), xix.

12

William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. and with an introduction by Ronald Paulson

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 87.

13

Hogarth, The Analysis, 86–87.

14

Meyers identifies Bartram’s consistent use of reflected form and links it to his environmental

view of nature; see “Sketches from the Wilderness: Changing Conceptions of Nature in

American Natural History Illustration, 1680–1880” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985), 132–38.

15

This drawing is believed to contain one of the first portrayals of the Venus’s flytrap seen in

Europe. After showing the drawing to his friend, John Fothergill, Collinson wrote to Bartram,

“the Decoration of the Ground, about the faba Egyptica [American lotus] are Imaginary plants—

which [Fothergill] thinks is quite out of Character, —When you have so many fine Real Ones.”

See Collinson to W. Bartram, July 18, 1768, The Search for Nature’s Design, 76.

16

The Library Company voted in 1764 to acquire the full suite of Hogarth’s prints, which were

finally purchased and delivered to Philadelphia in 1767. See Leonard Larabee, ed., Papers of

Benjamin Franklin, January 1 through December 31, 1766, vol. 13 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1969), 271, n. 4. They acquired their first copy of Hogarth’s Analysis between

1757 and 1765, and a second copy when they merged with the Union Library in 1769; see The

Charter, Laws, and Catalogue of Books, of the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia:

B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1765), 43.

17

To telegraph the importance of pursuit and discovery, Hogarth featured Christopher Columbus

on the subscription ticket for the Analysis; see also Hogarth, The Analysis, 32.

18

Ibid.

19

Hogarth, The Analysis, 44, 46.

20

Ibid.

21

Frédéric Ogée, “Je-sais-quoi: William Hogarth and the Representation of the Forms of Life,”

in Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, ed. David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, and Peter

Wagner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 76–77.

22

Collinson to W. Bartram, Feb. 16, 1768, The Search for Nature’s Design, 70–71.